chrnoble wrote:I am a bit of an odd duck, in that I like the Gnome 3 "family" of desktops- Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, and Unity (in that order). So, if I had a choice, I'd have Cinnamon. But I stick with MATE, because of my Nvidia driver.

I have a Nvidia GeForce 6150SE, which (I gather) is getting up in age, and which Nvidia is no longer supporting in Linux. Which is the reason Windows 8, with all its spinning tiles and so forth, has desktop effects that are smooth as anything, and the Gnome 3 desktops are slow and sticky.

Unless I'm running the open source driver. Then, they run fine. But I like my Nvidia driver. Neuvau is close, but not quite there, yet. So, it's MATE, until I get a new machine.

You can always install an older driver. Doesn't have to be "latest and greatest".

Well, maybe I should clarify. The desktop animations for Cinnamon, Gnome Shell, and Unity are what I can only call "sticky"- they're slow, and they freeze for a half a second or longer. Opening a menu on Cinnamon takes a long time. This is with the Nvidia driver.

When I use the open source driver, the animations are smooth, there is no lag for the menu. But, because it's the open source driver, it's noticeably duller-looking than the proprietary. Things like Minecraft are terribly slow using Nouveau.

Investigating this, I was led to understand that the reason for this is that Nvidia does not really support a card as old as mine for use with Linux. It does for Windows, but not Linux. For this reason, I've been choosing between MATE, XFCE, and so forth, which work fine with a Nvidia driver.

Is this incorrect? If the solution to this problem is to install an older version of the driver, how do I do this?

(Am I now horribly off-topic?)

I genuinely like MATE- it's solid, and I enjoy making it look like old-school Ubuntu Hardy Heron, just because. But I'd prefer to use the newer desktops, if I can get them to work with my driver with a minimum amount of hitting my OS with a wrench.